Abstract
Reading Mikolay Szoltysek magisterial study of family life in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC) at the end of the eighteenth century is a little like reviewing the development of the family history specialty itself. The names of Peter Laslett, John Hajnal, Richard Wall, E. A. Hammel, Michael Mitterauer, Lutz Berkner, Peter Czap, and of many other early researchers of family/household subjects recur in the text, as the author carefully examines their efforts to make sense of the European east while they were helping to create an unrivaled amount of information about family matters in the western parts of the continent. This perhaps is not unexpected, because in these two volumes Szoltysek aims to reexamine, with the help of a substantial database called CEURFAMFORM, the way in which the family-research groundbreakers formulated European regional pattern differences, how they and later scholars used the proposed regionalization models, and how the initial formulations now appear in light of his project’s findings from households listings and other archival population sources from East-central Europe. At issue are the initial comparative models such as the famous “Hajnal line,” Laslett’s four-part model of European “tendencies,” and Mitterauer’s proposal to link regional differences to basic land use patterns, as well as the contemporary critiques of these proposals offered by historical demographers and population statisticians familiar with microsimulation models and skeptical about regionalization efforts as such. As debates continued during the first several decades of the field’s development, the mass of empirical evidence about European family systems in the premodern era was expanding rapidly from work with sources from western, northern, and southern cultural areas, as in these regions, the field of family history took root and researchers found institutional support. By contrast, European eastern regions in the pre-twentieth-century period continued to be represented in the totality of empirical evidence by relatively few localized studies of individual landed estates and village communities; moreover, these were being added to only incrementally. In the east, a dominant ideology assigned little importance to family/household research while western scholars using eastern sources remained few in number. Research on the east, in other words, was unable to dislodge the ideas embedded in the early models of historic Europe: that Europe was a continent of two great family systems: the nucleated two-generational family and the simple family household in the “west” and the three-generational complex family and household in the “east.” As Szoltysek explains in the first chapters of the book (vol. 1, pp. 46–80), many western scholars would not have opposed a different conceptualization of “the east.” But the initial formulations, especially John Hajnal’s “line” dividing Europe from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Adriatic in the south, were a sufficiently robust framework to absorb a great deal of counterevidence without changing its main thrust. While understanding of the western “system” was becoming increasingly nuanced, the east continued to be thought of as a vast region dominated by complex family forms and occasionally referred to as the “Slavic world.”
The author’s selection of the PLC as the testing area for the early west–east paradigm appears to have been a logical and rewarding one, in part because the project’s participants had the linguistic skills to deal with the variegated population sources of this once dominant but now nearly forgotten (in the west) central European imperial power. The PLC disappeared from European maps during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as the regional “great powers”—Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire—divided its lands between themselves in the celebrated “partitions of Poland.” Before that happened, however, the PLC, expanding constantly from the late medieval centuries onward, had accumulated within its borders a great diversity of distinctive linguistic, cultural, and religious subpopulations, with the Poles and Lithuanians of its name being only two of many, though the dominant pair (see maps, vol. I, pp. 114–124). The very nature of the Commonwealth thus meant that a modern database anchored in its population records would have a reach that then went far beyond the borders of twenty-first-century Poland and Lithuania. At its height, the PLC included territories that are currently part of the modern nation-states of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and, in earlier centuries, the eastern marches of the Kingdom of Prussia as well. Operationally, however, this also meant substantial problems pertaining to the standardization of microdata, their comparability, and the proper level of aggregation, as Szoltysek explains in appendix I in vol. II.
The CEURFAMFORM database contains information on 26,654 families/households from twelve subregions of the vast PLC territory, obtained from documents that generically fall into the now-classic “household listings” category. The human population of these domestic groups, at the moment they entered the listings, was 155,818, and they were organized on the ground as parishes, land estates, and/or villages. The twelve subregions were chosen in order for the database to have adequate geographical representation from four macroregions (clusters)—WEST, EAST1, EAST2, and EAST3—so as to facilitate comparative discussion of the findings. On a map of the PLC, the four clusters or macroregions run in a west-to-east direction, with WEST lying in what today is the Republic of Poland, EAST1 and EAST2 largely in the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine, and EAST3 in the farthest reaches of Belarus. With the empirical information deployed in this manner, the PLC database becomes something like a microcosm of the whole European continent as it figured in earlier discussions, having a west, a middle territory, and an east. The twelve subregions, of course, each has a unique indigenous name (e.g., Warnia, Krakowskie, Podolia, Polessya), but in his extensive discussion of the database and findings (in both volumes) Szoltysek is careful to mix the use of indigenous and database designations, possibly because most English-using readers are unlikely to have mental maps of these territories unless they are specialists.
Szoltysek’s detailed discussion of the database is meant to confirm that this time generalizations about the east will rest on a representative sample of the PLC territorial population and not just on isolated case studies. The organization of CEURFAMFORM allows him to move between different levels of aggregation and test various lines of interpretation with differently sized data sets. The book generally eschews interpretations of patterns or tendencies by reference to ethnicity, in part because at the end of the eighteenth century the utility of such aggregative categories as “ethnicity” and “nationality” remains unclear and in part because the data sources themselves make sparse use of them. In tentatively putting forward explanations of identifiable patterns, the author generally uses social, economic, and demographic variables. The PLC was not a centralized nation-state with officials generating a uniform set of population documents, but a decentralized and internally a loosely connected “imperial” entity in which the relevant sources were often produced for local and regional purposes and were therefore anything but uniform. As a research strategy, therefore, the clustering of seemingly disjointed and relatively small information pools into larger but by definition artificial units makes a great deal of sense; otherwise, ground-level variation would render comparative statements virtually impossible. Even so, finding the best level at which to generalize comparatively (i.e., how much to aggregate) remains a judgment call, but Szoltysek’s intricate reasoning on this matter confirms that the project of “Rethinking East-central Europe” is very much aware of it. Hovering above these extended methodological discussions, however, is the specter of earlier, and in the author’s view, premature generalizations—such as the Hajnal line—that had the effect of carrying the comparative discussion of European families and households to so high a level that on-the-ground diversity in the east never properly registered itself. The east continued to be characterized with strong statements grounded in a handful serf-estate studies (frequently Peter Czap’s pioneering work on the central Russian estate of Mishino) that ultimately turned out to be unrepresentative of the ethnic Russian population.
With CEURFAMFORM in hand (even though, as Szoltysek reports, the database is constantly being supplemented and corrected), the author proceeds to analyze the collection by posing to it a bevy of questions very familiar to all researchers in the field of family history: the age of leaving home, life-cycle servitude, nuptiality (including age at marriage), household formation, and domestic group (household) structure and size. Within the review of each of these time-tried probes, other significant matters receive attention: microsimulation, in order to see whether certain coresidential patterns might be affected by purely demographic constraints, the possible effects of landowner decisions on peasant family structure, the stem-family problem and the possible existence of this family form in eastern European populations, kinship within and beyond the household, the utility of the familiar Cambridge Group household typology, and the problem of headship within the domestic group. Over the decades, these matters have all been repeatedly investigated in western European communities, yielding a variety of answers depending on location, but for the PLC most are here being posed for the first time, supplying to other researches empirical findings that have never been available before. Szoltysek, to repeat, has a larger agenda, but making new information available on a host of eastern communities (and local regions) is decidedly an important contribution by the project as a whole.
Evaluating the data in CEURFAMFORM by asking questions largely formulated within western-focused research has several effects. First, the exercise incorporates a vast amount of eastern European material into a comparative framework that through multiple applications has withstood the test of time and thus counteracts the traditional desire by scholars in the east to devise analytical instruments of their own on the basis of the belief in exceptionalism. In Szoltysek’s handling of “indigenous” research, two interesting turns are to be noted. By extensively using the earlier and largely nonquantitative researches of scholars native to the examined region—largely Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian—he demonstrates clearly that while analytical categories and interpretations have changed, the earlier work is not incompatible with the comparative framework launched by the western pioneers of family/household history. Further, by slightly modifying the Cambridge Group household classification scheme, he corroborates once again that such categories as “simple family household,” “extended family household,” and “multiple family household” have retained their usefulness as a platform for cross-cultural comparisons. The second effect is a persuasive demonstration of the fact that, whatever the mixture of eastern patterns is finally determined to be, it need not be thought of as uniform throughout the area or as exotic. Instead, what emerges from Sztolysek’s account is the portrait of an extensive territory in which rural families and households at the end of the eighteenth century generated patterns and structures by pursuing the same quotidian survival strategies as their counterparts in other European regions. Their composition and inner dynamics, in other words, were entirely recognizable: marriage, leaving home or not leaving it, childbearing, work that involved various “servant” statuses, household structures that changed over time, household headships that passed from one generation to the next, and the bending of custom to immediate necessity. To be sure, the measurable results of these family/household dynamics in the east varied by locality and region, and the findings for the PLC illustrate this very well. On most variables examined by the author, the WEST cluster differs from all the EAST clusters and contrasts particularly strongly with EAST3. Most important is the point that such results—considerable diversity—have been obtained by using the same, or nearly the same analytical, categories that opened western European families and households to scrutiny in the early decades of the field.
There were, of course, certain variables that conceivably played a much greater role as determinants, or at least as factors of significance, in the east while being for the most part latent in the western regions. One of these—the extent to which landowners, estate owners, and other persons in authority could affect family lives of “their” peasants—has a prominent place in the book’s discussion. This was inescapable because in most of the territories of the PLC that supplied data for CEURFAMFORM, various forms of “second serfdom” remained active well into the nineteenth century when serf emancipation entered the picture. On this question of manorialism (see vol. 1: table 5 and pp. 227–229), Szoltysek does not come to a general conclusion but argues that landowner interference remains one of a series of explanatory factors. The data from all clusters in the PLC are not convincing enough to support a single generalization for the entire Commonwealth. The subject remains important, however, because it is linked to another large question—peasant “agency” or, as the author puts it, “the individualization of the peasant family” (vol. 1, p. 229)—but to reach an arguable hypothesis, more information about managerial policies data is needed. The degree of landowner interventionism in the lives of their “captive” labor force was itself variable, and this prevents all easy conceptualizations of what “the serf estate” was at the end of the eighteenth century.
The gravamen of Szoltysek’s massive project is, as mentioned, that at the turn of the nineteenth century, there was no such single territory as “eastern Europe,” and he returns to this point repeatedly (see vol. 1, pp. 448, 486, 487, 492, 529, 574). The general view of the European continent that was being consolidated as empirical research on European families unfolded during the first several decades of the field was already on the wrong track with paradigms that used terms such as “dual Europe,” employed the “dividing line” metaphor, and speculated about the existence of an “undifferentiated Slavic eastern Europe” (the latter phrase is referred to as “dogma” [vol. 1, p. 678]). In the early chapters about the development of the field, Szoltysek points to some of the early research that had already raised questions about the dominant modes of Europe’s regionalization but also notes the power of the Hajnal line image that seemed to guide all researchers, even those working on eastern communities. Individual research agendas referenced the Hajnal line and described findings in terms of it, that is, whether evidence placed a particular community east or west of “the line.” The prevailing image of Europe eventually came to include a west in which domestic groups in the premodern era tended toward simplicity and an east where they tended toward complexity. The quantitative findings from CEURFAMFORM about all the interlocking aspects of domestic group structure and dynamics reveal, the book argues via an examination of the PLC at the end of the eighteenth century, that the proposed east/west division was an oversimplification. Not only did the west contain many regions in which complexity was quite evident but also the east did not start where the Hajnal line said it did. If the line metaphor is useful at all—and Szoltysek doubts its continued relevance—it needs to be drawn much farther to the east. The findings of CEURFAMFORM suggest that the “western” region of the Commonwealth tended toward domestic group characteristics that did not clearly distinguish it from other regions further to the west and that the easternmost cluster of communities (Central Belarus and Polessya) possessed characteristics that made it resemble (though no replicate) the central Russian estates researched by such scholars as Peter Czap. There existed, in other words, something like a populous middle territory (defined here by the borders of the PLC) that could not be defined simply as a “transition zone” (as some of the early research tended to do and as Szoltysek himself gingerly brings the term into the discussion [vol. 1, p. 773]) without further investigation. Or to put it yet another way, the metaphor of a “line dividing Europe,” powerful as it was, invited misunderstandings and misreported the true diversity of family systems on the European continent. This then is the thrust of the book’s title—“Rethinking East-central Europe”—with that phrase carrying with it implications for further research not only about this “middle territory” but about the populous Russian regions as well. Western research on Russian archival sources—continuing to expand very slowly—suggests that Peter Czap’s Mishino-based “perennial multiple family household” may not be representative of an underlying Russian diversity either and that much more work needs to be done to lock in or relativize the findings of Czap’s pioneering work. Szoltysek’s conclusion about such line-drawing exercises is categorical. The findings about PLC [lead] us to reject the appropriateness of the model of ‘the eastern European family type’ as it was used by Hajnal and Czap, and to question the existence of a demographically uniform population of eastern Europe in general…[R]etaining a dichotomous division into two zones of familial behavior defined across some imaginary “line” in Europe is no longer defensible. Without denying that at the highest level of aggregation the east was different from the west, it should be clear that the region (the East—AP) hardly represented a coherent entity on any of the family-related variables we have discussed. (vol. I, p. 778)
At the end of volume I, Szoltysek devotes twenty-one pages (vol. 1, pp. 771–792) to a discussion of the general implications of his findings and makes several suggestions about future research they call for. Not surprisingly, the main problems revolve around the meaning of the diversity of family forms in the various regions of the European continent, most particularly in the east-central region. The identified patterns and structures in the PLC revealed a wide spectrum, with its west resembling (but not identically to) in many respects the west of earlier scholarship and its east being reminiscent of the findings for the interior of Russia (the east of earlier scholarship). The next steps are discussed very carefully and imply that more confident statements about the zones, regions, and dominant/subordinate patterns within them will have to await additional research on the lands inadequately represented in the totality of findings about Europe. Above all, this means the Russian territories, where the presence of considerable “diversity” has been suggested by some earlier work but has not yet been conclusively established to be the case. Szoltysek’s careful statements about the ultimate meaning of his PLC findings are something of a contrast with what occasionally were referred to as the “strong hypotheses” of the earlier generation of European family researchers. The care with which Szoltysek deals with this subject can be read as a warning against the strong desire for ever-widening and continental-level comparative thinking—for example, Europe and Asia (vol. 1, p. 781)—that seems to be deeply embedded in the consciousness of western social scientists. If it is true that the European west was diverse in the premodern period, and demonstrably also the territories of the PLC, what about the Russian territories with their nearly 100 million inhabitants, a large variety of ecotypes, and greatly differing land management systems? A new “strong hypothesis” about Europe as a whole would seem to be unwise before all the evidence is in, but the rapid emergence of new evidence, produced by researchers in Russian Federations and/or western scholars working with Russian sources seems, at this juncture, to be highly unlikely. In the meantime, Rethinking East-central Europe remains an admirable model of how patient scholarship can bring a highly heterogeneous European region into the now decadeslong ongoing discussion of about families and households on the European continent. This is family research at its best, not being dismissive of earlier work but engaging with its arguments and making use of new analytical techniques (such as microsimulation) that in earlier phases of the field’s development were devised to deal with thorny questions.